Sunday, February 12, 2012

Marriage

Sometimes before I take my first sip of coffee I’ll type out the title of whatever I’m going to blog about and go from there. Sometimes this can be dangerous.

On a whim I decided to look up the definition of the word ‘marriage’ to find out how it is defined in Merriam-Webster. The wording didn’t surprise me all too much, but the fact that there are apparently comment boards allowed on a dictionary website was intriguing. Without much thought, I perused the comments. I expected the typical “traditional marriage” comments, but was surprised to see an equal number of counter comments in support of the definition to be both between a man and a woman and between two people of the same sex.

Last night at the town hall meeting in Longview, Washington of all places where I was on the panel of speakers (and didn’t pee my pants so, yay! Success!) I thought for certain there would be a good sized population opposed to us on the topic of Equal Marriage Rights. There were none. And we were in a church filled with a crowd that had a lot of silver and white hair. It was then that I realized it wasn’t my grandparents’ generation that was holding on to “traditional” ideals, but my parents’ generation. The same generation that created the Free Love movement of the 1970s became the Greedy Yuppies of the 1980s who became the Hypocritical Conservatives of the 1990s and have been spreading a message of hate and intolerance toward any change that would bring them back to the Utopian concept of their youth. What I don’t understand is why?

People are so easily persuaded by people they perceive to be in power. So if someone on the television claims they are speaking the truth and word of God, a fairly large amount of people will believe them because they said so and will send them gobs of money to continue spreading hateful messages because they’re also told that if they don’t they’ll burn in hell. People are like sheep, and sheep are afraid of a lot of things. Fear is the real matter here. Fear is what drives a vast majority of us to not upset the flow of things, to stay in the unmoving lane of traffic even though the road that parallels it is empty.

I say to make your own conclusions before condemning someone. If you want to continue to use the same six verses in the Bible that talk about rape and pretend they are about homosexuality because someone in the fifteenth century didn’t understand Hebrew and Greek well enough to translate a few verses, then perhaps you should also look up the over nine-hundred and thirty instances where it talks about proper heterosexuality, which, by the way, includes a wide definition for the word ‘marriage’. Anyone who thinks this One Man One Woman ideal of marriage is the sanctioned in the Bible as the only way, obvious has never read it. Or perhaps they’ve only heard what someone on the television in a fancy expensive suit or cheap wig and bad makeup told them.

Marriage should not be limited to a ruling majority, but to any consenting adults willing to make a commitment to each other. Here, I’ll make it simple: If you don’t like GAY marriage don’t marry a GAY person.